Bruce Dowbiggin
Three Books to End the Silence
From the Brownstone Institute
My first thought upon reading it was: I cannot believe that this was allowed to be published! That’s the interesting part. Despite every attempt by the national security state and the vast army of censorial bureaucrats, we still have enough freedom to get the word out, for now.
Think of this. In the time since the Covid crisis has passed, no aspect of any federal power that was deployed to wreck a functioning society has been repealed. Not one law, regulation, edict, or power.
Some courts have struck down certain bureaucratic practices, such as the nationwide mask mandate and the eviction moratorium, which were, respectively, huge attacks on bodily autonomy and property rights. Those were ruled inadmissible, at tremendous expense to plaintiffs.
Otherwise, the bureaucracy has not budged an inch.
At the onset of this disaster, the CDC started simply posting edicts. They started with washing hands and staying home if you were sick. Quickly, they got carried away. Every business needed stay-at-home policies, canceled meetings, posted signs warning of omnipresent danger, sanitizer stations everywhere, no sharing of pens and scissors, plus Plexiglas everywhere.
Any CDC bureaucrat with logins could add a point of “guidance” but for most people, they were law. What a rush for the rulemakers! The edicts were passed on to state health departments, which sent them to counties, and they landed in HR departments in every company. For practical purposes, these were law to most people, because the consequences of disobeying were essentially unknown.
What about now? The CDC simply deleted its webpage. No apologies, no repeals, no reforms, just a delete button. It was there then it was gone.
When first issued it looked like this. A year later, it became a vast machinery of control, as you can see here. With each new update, the screws tightened. (Someone could have a great time parsing every word of every iteration and documenting it.)
Complying with everything would require vast expenditure and a crazed kabuki dance of extreme germophobia, such that it is hard to see how business could get done at all. Every sentence talks of guidance and advice but none cites “science” much less any authority for how any of this was legal. And yet millions of businesses either shut forever or experienced massive financial stress, which hurt everyone. Of course some enterprises thrived: those lucky enough to be considered “essential” and received the bulk of federal funding!
It’s more than obvious that we cannot depend on the federal government to get us to the truth about what happened. Vast amount of content on Brownstone.org explores this daily. In addition there are three books that everyone needs to digest now to get a full sense of the whole. There was much more going on that simple bureaucratic incompetence.
Our Enemy, the Government by Ramesh Thakur is the most scientifically sophisticated and yet accessible account of the amazing screw-ups of public health during this period. Keep in mind that the policy response was mostly the same all over the world but for a few nations. Thakur’s focus is on Australia but people in every nation will recognize the pattern. Each chapter takes on a new element, from the wild exaggeration of the universal threat of Covid, to the faulty testing regime, to the death misclassifications, to the spending mania, to the flurry of insane edicts on masking, vaccination, and forced human separation. It’s a tour de force for the ages, and leaves a devastating impression.
Keep in mind that Thakur is not just some writer. He was once the Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations under Kofi Annan in addition to being a famed scholar. He has risked everything in writing this book but once he started peeling away at the onion that is the Covid response, he simply could not stop. He had to do the right thing and go the full way. The book is overwhelming in terms of charts, data, evidence, and citations but this is what is necessary to smash the paradigm. His main concern is the health and well-being of the human population. It was this that was wrecked over three years.
Next comes Rand Paul’s Deception. Throughout these awful years, Senator Paul has been an absolute godsend, and for two reasons. He is a medical doctor and extremely smart, so he was never intimidated by Anthony Fauci’s pseudoscientific gobbledygook. He saw right through the guy from the very beginning.
Crucially, as a US Senator, he had unusual access to Fauci that enabled him to question him directly. This is something that Fauci had tried to avoid from the beginning. We know from his email and scheduling that Fauci was extremely careful through the whole period to grant only friendly interviews on captured venues. This was a main objective, and precisely why he got away with it. But with Rand in the Senate, he was entitled to a limited amount of time to ask questions. He used every minute well. The results are gold.
His book is the full account of how Fauci worked from day one to avoid any culpability for the funding of the Wuhan lab through third parties that might have been responsible for the leak of the virus. The book, then, reveals the scandal of the century. Fauci has been enormously powerful, controlling billions in grant funding. He deployed all his power, money, and connections to avoid his direct professional responsibilities and scrub his record to make himself unaccountable. Rand has all the receipts, and bravely presents them in this important book.
To deepen the plot, we have The Wuhan Coverup by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is a much more focused and tighter work than his previous book on Fauci. I swear that anyone who grabs it and reads it will never think about government the same way. It’s that powerful and comprehensive. At issue for Kennedy is the US bioweapons program that began after the Second World War and continues to this day. It is responsible for vast corruption, the empowerment and entanglement of pharmaceutical companies, and the use of secretive classification powers to keep the American people in the dark.
If you suspected that the national security apparatus had some role in the pandemic response, you would be correct about that. This book is the one that has gone further than any other to document this scary reality. The Department of Defense and the CIA had a huge role in making rules for the rest of the population to prepare the way for the presumed antidote that was rolled out with tax funding and legal indemnification against harms, by companies that owned the patents and had publicly traded stocks you could buy. Nothing about this whole machinery has anything to do with things like freedom and democracy but there it is, malicious corporatism in a nutshell.
RFK has laid it all out in eye-popping page after page. My first thought upon reading it was: I cannot believe that this was allowed to be published! That’s the interesting part. Despite every attempt by the national security state and the vast army of censorial bureaucrats, we still have enough freedom to get the word out, for now. This is why it is so important to get this book now and digest its contents. There could come a time when we won’t be allowed to read such things. That is clearly the ambition in any case.
Did the pandemic response affect your life? Your kids? Your community? Yes, and profoundly. As a citizen you have every reason to care about how and why terrible things were done to us.
It’s not enough just to forget the whole thing like a bad dream. We cannot just delete the page from the history books, as the CDC has done, and pretend like it is over and done and nothing needs to change. We must deal with reality. And these books take us to new levels of understanding. That is the first step toward change.
Author
Just In: The Trudeau government intervenes at last minute to save a convicted climate agitator from deportation. The Pakistani co-founder of Save Old Growth— who first came to Canada in 2019 on a study permit— has been arrested at least 10 times and convicted of mischief. Zain Haq was due to be deported to Pakistan on Monday.
Despite a judge’s ruling denying his last hope of staying , Haq got a call from his Liberal MP’s office saying he gets to stay in B.C. after all. Good, because we’d hate for him to feel oppressed by the country in which he’s squatting. The news thrilled the nepo babies who have B.C. by the throat.
So Haq goes from unrepentant jerk to Christ crucified. Naturally. Victim politics have become the animating impulse in Western society. Attaching yourself to a forlorn cause like Haq is grounds for beatification And make no mistake, there are legions in identical little tents on campus quads who are cheering a non-Canadian defying The Man.
To generations brought up on the travails of feminist oppression, climate degradation, indigenous grievance and gender dysphoria there is nothing so sacred as a victim is all his purity, crushed by the Great White Satan of western culture. Haq is just the latest in a police lineup of wobbly performance artists taking a rhapsodic bow before the Liberal/ NDP/Green clique. While thumbing his nose at Canadians.
That’s why the current fetish for Palestinian outrage has such legs as it spreads across campuses and governmental buildings in the West. Anyone (but a white, straight male) can apply for the designation of victim. Join the party! And what a model it is! While many have tried to emulate them, none have managed the nihilist hat trick of violence, obstinacy and craven guilt quite like the Palestinians who’ve been pushing this agenda since the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Having eschewed frontal military attacks on Israel and western targets as ineffective, the PLO and its successors discovered that the more grisly the attack, the more black their message — in Munich they massacred 11 Israeli athletes— there was a segment of leftist Western culture that couldn’t get enough of their heinous tactics. (Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich pitied his fellow Jews killed in Munich but concluded that all this revenge stuff was a dead end.)
Huh. Their Arab neighbours want nothing to do with Arafat’s Children. Egypt has a wall preventing Gazans from entering their county, Jordan has expelled them for counter-insurgency, Saudi Arabia ignores them. Only Qatar offers refuge. And then only to the billionaire kleptocrats who run Hamas from penthouses in Doha.
The Oct. 7 massacre is just the latest in this dance of death with western liberals. People of a certain age will recall the Marxist-besotted Vanessa Redgrave brandishing a Kalashnikov while dancing with the PLO and its rascally leader Yasser Arafat. Her 1977 film The Palestinian was an orgy of guilt and hatred toward Israel. She’s had plenty of imitators in the media ever since. In 2021 over 100 actors— including Richard Gere, Claire Foy, Tilda Swinton, and Susan Sarandon— slammed the terrorist designation of Palestinian “rights groups”.
The same apologists are now saying that, sure, Oct. 7 went a little too far, but Palestinian repatriation means a few eggs are going to get smashed in the making of a terror state. They want a cease fire with good taste.
Were the PLO successors in Hamas and Hezbollah able to articulate some coherent vision of the future beyond slaughter then these western struggle sessions might seem justified. It’s no surprise that Arafat was the epitome of “never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity” in negotiations. If there’s one constant in the multiple denials of treaties with Israel it is their unflinching demand that Palestinians throw every Jew they encounter into the Mediterranean on a march from “the river to the sea”.
The implacable marriage with extreme violence and racial hatred is their one and only position. Non-negotiable. None of this has any effect on the hot-house Marxists and anarchists who’ve set up shop in the universities and colleges of the West. In their protected status among the leafy tendrils of the Ivy League, a little brush with terror seems to titillate them. Occupying the quad in identical tents suppled by unnamed international groups dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism is their bougie weekend of roughing it in the bush.
Most probably wish they could experience a little of the martyrdom like the Palestinians (a gentle martyrdom naturally) or at the very least a cinematic clash wth authority such as their parents experienced at the hands of Chicago mayor Richard Daley during the 1968 Democratic convention. A tender tussle covered by their parents Medicare.
Who will stand up to these playtime antisemites? Alas, the grownups in the schools administration and in governments are cut from the same cloth. Having created safe spaces from micro aggression on their campus , they excuse the youthful exuberance of their students. (If your politics are radical, that is.) Like president Joe Biden they do the suck-and-blow of modern debate. They decry antisemitism while cautioning that we just don’t understand the depths of Palestinian oppression. Evan as students call for a new Holocaust.
Having it both ways with Hamas means a one-way invitation to more chaos. Because there is no agenda beyond the performative terror extolled by demonstrators against Israel there is no way to rationally critique Hezbollah or Hamas. At least the Nazis proposed some freakazoid homeland for their people as they heartlessly slaughtered anyone who got in their way.
So it all becomes mob mentality packaged for feckless media. The Hamas doctoral groupies don’t demand anything from Hamas beyond their faux-serious chants and designer kaffiyehs in the House of Commons. No doubt Zia Haq will be joining them again soon in the struggle. If Stephen Guilbeault can go from criminal to cabinet, Canada is wide open to him now.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. New from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin now for pre-order: Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. Launching on paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week.
It came to this. Playing in the 6,000 seat Mullet Arena on the campus of Arizona State. Owned by a luckless guy who eschewed the public spotlight. Out of the playoffs, their bags packed for who knows where, the Arizona (née Phoenix) Coyotes gave an appreciative wave to the tiny crowd gathered to say Thanks For The Memories.
With that they were history. Although NHL commissioner-for-life Gary Bettman has promised the last in a set of hapless owners that he can revive the franchise for a cool billion should he build the rink that no one was willing to build for the Yotes the past 20 years.
The Arizona Republic said good riddance. “Metro Phoenix lost the Coyotes because we are an oversaturated professional and college sports market with an endless supply of sunshine and recreational choices. Arizona may have dodged a slapshot:
We have the NFL Cardinals, the MLB Diamondbacks, the NBA Suns, MLB spring training, the WM Phoenix Open, the Phoenix Rising, the WNBA Mercury, the Indoor Football League Rattlers and the Arizona State Sun Devils. There hasn’t been a household name on the Coyotes since Shane Doan, and half of Phoenix probably doesn’t know who he was”.
Likely they’ll be a financial success in Salt Lake City where there’s a viable owner, lots of money and a will to make it work. They’ll need a will because— stop me if you’ve heard this before about the Coyotes— the rink they’ll play in this fall has only 12,500 unobstructed views for hockey.
Watching this farce we recalled getting a call from Blackberry co-founder Jim Balsillie in 2008, shortly after our book Money Players was a finalist for the Canadian Business Book of The Year. We’d written a fair bit about the Coyotes in our work and someone had told Balsillie we might be the ones to talk to about a plan he was concocting to buy the bankrupt Coyotes and eventually move them to Hamilton.
Balsillie was salty over the way he’d been used as a stalking horse in the financial troubles of the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1990s. Flush with money from the huge success of RIM, Balsillie offered to buy the Pens, with an eye to moving them to southern Ontario if Pittsburgh didn’t help build a new arena for the team.
In time, Balsillie saw that Bettman was only trying to protect the investment Mario Lemieux and others had in the Pens. Balsillie was the black hat who eventually spooked Pittsburgh into giving the current owners what they wanted. At the end of the day, Mario got his money and Balsillie was given a “thanks for trying”: parting gift of nebulous promises.
Still smarting, Balsille vowed not to be used again. in his desire to bring the NHL to southern Ontario. So when the Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes threw the keys to the team on Bettman’s desk, he saw an opening in the bankruptcy that followed. Seeing Bettman as the impediment, Balsillie decided to buy the team out of bankruptcy, a process the NHL could not legally prevent.
What Balsillie wanted to know was “What then? How would Bettman fight back?” We told him that no one flouts Bettman’s authority within the NHL. (All the current owners since 1993 have come aboard on his watch.) And that he’d have to get the Board of Governors to approve his purchase. Odds: Nil.
That’s what happened. Rather than admit that the Valley of the Sun was poisoned for hockey, Bettman found another series of undercapitalized marks to front the franchise while the league quietly propped up the operation. No longer was the Coyotes’ failure about the fans of Arizona. It was about Gary Bettman’s pride.
Protestors stand outside a press conference in Tempe featuring Arizona Coyotes executives discussing propositions related to a new arena and entertainment district. (Photo by Brooklyn Hall/ Cronkite News)
Where he had meekly let Atlanta move to Winnipeg he fought like hell to save Arizona. And his power. (His obstinacy on U.S. network TV is another story.)
Fast forward to last week and the abject failure of that process. The Arizona Republic naively fawned on Bettman for his many attempts to save the team. In fact, they were just attempts to buttress his grip on the league. While the Coyotes may have been a mess, Bettman has succeeded in preserving the investments of most of the business people who bought his NHL business prospectus.
Sometimes it meant riding into Calgary to chastise the locals for their parsimony in not giving the Flames a new rink. Ditto for Edmonton. Ditto for Winnipeg and other cities. Other times it was to shore up weak partners to protect the equity of other prosperous cities. Sometimes it was to tell Quebec City, “Not gonna’ happen.”
For his loyalty to the owners and through some luck— Gretzky to the Kings— Bettman has made the NHL work in places no one might’ve imagined. Nashville. Raleigh. Tampa. Las Vegas. Dallas. Not at the level of the NFL, NBA or MLB, but at a comfortable equity-affirming status. Nothing happens without his say-so in the NHL. Or without him getting credit. Secondary NHL execs who wanted credit for their innovations were quietly punted.
When Houston finally gets a franchise from Gary they’ll part with $1.5 billion for the honour. While the commissioner has played down new franchises and expanded playoffs, you can bet your last dollar that he’s told owners they’re in line for more expansion cash— cash they don’t have to split with players in collective bargaining.
One more certainty. As long as Bettman rules the NHL you won’t see an NHL team back in Arizona.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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